Book Review: The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity, by Paul Apostolidis

• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211031525
• Published date: 01 April 2022
• Date: 01 April 2022
• Author: Joseph Lowndes
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

372 Political Theory 50(2)

The challenge of fostering decolonial solidarity is a difficult one, and in

thinking through it, The Colonizing Self contains important lessons regarding

the durability of settler colonialism and the micropolitical work necessary to

unravel violent attachments. The focused and developed theory of the colo-

nizer sheds light on the material structures and affective politics that preserve

Israeli policies of forced displacement and make possible the ongoing occu-

pation of Palestinian homes by settlers. Although it may not offer a starting

point to envision a politics beyond colonialism, it foregrounds many of the

challenges to such a task. As such, the book shows that the task of critique

will not only be a matter of revealing. It will also need to be unsettling.

The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity, by Paul

Apostolidis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 314 pp.

Reviewed by: Joseph Lowndes, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211031525

Precarity—contingent, mobile, and insecure labor—increasingly defines

conditions of work in the neoliberal era. Paul Apostolidis’s The Fight for

Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity centers his

contribution to the growing literature on the subject in a study of day laborers

in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. These workers—largely unauthorized migrants

employed on a day-to-day basis, often working in construction, moving,

landscaping, and other mostly unskilled, short-term jobs in the informal

economy—evince conditions of extreme vulnerability. For Apostolidis, the

study of these marginalized subjects opens onto larger horizons of analysis,

allowing readers both better diagnoses and prescriptions for the more general

dislocations wrought by precarity. “Lingering sympathetically and critically

with those mired most deeply in society’s ruts,” he writes, is “necessary

because general social phenomena invariably look different from the vantage

points such tarrying makes possible” (2). It also, he argues, opens onto larger

horizons of politics. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, Apostolidis reminds that

“it is often amid the ruins strewn across revealingly disordered landscapes

by societies bent on progress that theorists can discern the telltale marks of

domination and the stirrings of hope” (2). This understanding of day labor

anchors what the book teaches about both the conditions of precarity and the

possibilities for anticapitalist, radically democratic alternatives. These work-

ers are exceptional in the degree of their suffering, but nevertheless stand in

synecdochally for the affective, temporal, economic, and physical effects of

precarity more generally.